In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
You think that's bad? I bought a "RAM upgrade" over the phone from HAAS for a CNC machine back in 2016ish. The upgrade was from 1mb to 16mb of RAM.
The technician on the phone told me to go to the machine and punch in a series of keys followed by a 21 digit code. That was my ~$2,000 RAM upgrade.
The RAM was always there. It was just locked away as "reserve value" for the manufacturer.
Tesla won't let you buy parts unless you enter the vehicle vin. I believe some other things you have to order through the tesla app.
I think those kinds of requirements should be disallowed too.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
They're also well-known for artificially capping battery capacity unless you buy an unlock. There have been a few stories before about them unlocking the expanded capacity for free during emergencies.
Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
By the way, legacy car makers are also shifting to that model, BMW for example doesn't deliver paper-printed sheets for which fuse in the fuse box does what for a few years now, you have to use an online service. The logistics for printing the sheets for all the variants became too complex.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
I don't buy that. This strangehold is the only way that VW managed to cheat emissions for years without getting caught.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Who decides when parts go EOL?
I'm not making a judgment on whether it's worth it or not, I think that depends on a lot of details, but when people throw out tariffs they are rarely honest about the fact that it's a tax that flows downstream to the end user. In some cases multiple ways, like farmers who pay higher cost for equipment due to tariffs, so production of their soybeans (or whatever) are higher, so then they needs USDA subsidies to make them price competitive for export, so there's multiple layers of taxation there to make it work.
All of that fuckery is not going to help you or the technician when your car breaks.
I guess this suggests what kind of people should be buying Teslas (buying new cars every 1-3 years) and what their resale value should quickly become (disposable cars).
The best thing to do is to not buy it in the first place.
Charging to stop blocking the use of hardware features that are already present on a product you own however (like seat heaters or battery capacity), is unacceptable in my opinion.
Software Freedom would solve all these problems by making it trivial for users to buy a software patch from a third party vendor for cheap that unlocks the seat heaters, thus destroying the incentive for manufactures to do stupid stuff like that in the first place.